In a recent AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) by Col. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, he was asked the following question:

Is there any experience on Earth that even compares slightly to having been on the Moon?

Here is his reply:

My first words of my impression of being on the surface of the Moon that just came to my mind was “Magnificent desolation.” The magnificence of human beings, humanity, Planet Earth, maturing the technologies, imagination and courage to expand our capabilities beyond the next ocean, to dream about being on the Moon, and then taking advantage of increases in technology and carrying out that dream - achieving that is magnificent testimony to humanity. But it is also desolate - there is no place on earth as desolate as what I was viewing in those first moments on the Lunar Surface.

Because I realized what I was looking at, towards the horizon and in every...

In a world without technological progress, you have a zero-sum society. Its not clear whether capitalism could work in such a society. I certainly do not think that democratic representative government could work because it works by having a growing pie, in which, you forge compromises - you divvy up the pie, and everyone gets a little bit more as long as the pie keeps growing. When the pie stops growing, politics gets polarized, and people are really angry at each other, even when there are no objective differences at all. This, I think, is a pretty accurate description of politics in 2014.

This guy is a gem.

One of my main New Year Resolution for 2014, was to read more. Every year, I make that resolution, but never live upto it. This time, I decided to be more specific. I decided to read 3 books a month - comic, fiction, non-fiction, anything, but three in quantity. I thought this would be a good idea.

Its been precisely three months as I type this, so let me give you an idea of all the books I’ve read so far:

1. Maximum City by Suketu Mehta
2. The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4. Selected Feluda Stories by Satyajit Ray
5. Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton
6. Jaya by Devdutt Patnaik

Although I didn’t quite fulfill my resolution, I’m happy I managed to finish the 6 books. The good news is that I’ve recently been gifted a brand new Kindle Paperwhite, and that’s made life much easier. I plan to finish the following books in the coming 2 months; I hope I’m able to...

Here it is. Fresh slate, custom Domain Name, the whole deal. I’ve been writing around the web for quite some time. I’ve used WordPress, Blogger - for a while, I stayed with Medium for quite some time, but in the end, I decided I needed a custom Domain Name to start taking my writing seriously.

I needed a minimalist, bare bone, clean look, with a content-first idea. Github Pages was the natural answer, but the whole process of setting up via Jekyll, was quite, dare I say, intimidating, for a non coding person like myself ( I need to change that, this year). Finally, I decided to go with Svbtle, because a) Its great, if you just want a writing pad and nothing to do with a terminal and b) Minimalist outlook with a custom Domain Name. And so we’re up and about.

I’ve written a 101 on quite a few blogs of mine, but this is hopefully the last of that. The idea is to write relentlessly, and...